This was the question I asked the 1,000 strong audience at the SydStart event last Monday. There weren’t many hands up.

Why is it that so few people know? Well, a hazardous guess would be that people just really don’t care. And in lean-startup fashion – how do you verify this? By talking to people! It quickly becomes evident that they do care. The real problem here is that it’s too hard to work out – at least with the current set of traditional tools at your disposal – receipts, bank transactions, spreadsheets etc.

And that formed the basis for our pitch to SydStart – we make it ridiculously simple to manage your money.

And it resonated with the audience. Many people came up to me after the 5 minute pitch to find out more about what we were doing. Although we didn’t win (shout out to the winners ProcessGo), it was great to get Pocketbook in-front of an audience.

What we really wanted from SydStart was early users – and we got that in spades. Building a startup for a long period without getting actual users is a terrible idea.

How do you know they will like it? How will they use it? Do they find it useful? These are the questions we are trying to answer. So if anyone is reading – go to your address bar – type getpocketbook.com – press enter. Hopefully you get delighted by what you see. If you are not delighted please let us know! Feedback tab on the right.

So if you’re wondering how much you spent on your car last year. We’ll help you answer that. And we’ll tell you much you spent on your fuel, insurance and repairs.

Here’s my spending straight out of Pocketbook for last year (took me 15 secs from sign-in to get this info!).

Parking: $59
Insurance: $1045
Fuel: $791
Other Costs: $797

Total: $2692

Alvin